Monthly Archives: August 2008

I’m getting married today! Not just this second, though. I have nothing to do for five hours, then I’m going to be pretty busy. The other day I was looking for a picture I took from India of a sign that said “DON’T THROW ROCKS AT THE CROCODILES” with a picture of a crocodile throwing a rock at a woman wearing a sari. While looking for it I found another picture that reminded me of a highlight of the trip.

My sister and I were walking down a semi-busy city street by ourselves. A man sitting on a blanket at the street corner yelled for us to come over and like good stranger-danger kids, we did. On his blanket he had two small cages. One contained what looked like a green lovebird, and the other contained something we couldn’t see. He also had a pile of rectangular wooden coasters.

He didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Tamil but we all figured out among ourselves that if we gave him 20 rupees (about 50 cents) he would do something that involved those coasters and the cages of small animals.

50 cents- how could you go wrong?

We gave him the 20 rupees and he opened the cage containing the animal we couldn’t see before:

The guinea pig ran from the cage dutifully and starting pulling the wooden coasters off the pile with his teeth. My sister and I both howled because this trick alone was delightful and definitely worth 50 cents.

Because we were foreigners, we attracted a small crowd of people who wanted to watch the spectacle and one man who spoke limited English tried to translate for us. Once the wooden coasters were flipped over, it was clear that these were tarot cards. On the other side of each card were pictures, mostly of Hindu deities and some of fruit and one had a picture of helicopters that looked like the guinea pig wrangler had clipped them from a magazine and pasted onto the card.

The man who spoke limited English translated my fortune that was given to me in Tamil by the guinea pig wrangler:

“You…this is good time to buy majorpurchase. You can buy a car.” I wondered how he got that from helicopters, fruit and Lakshmi.

My sister got a fortune that was equally bland, something that sounded like what you might read in a fortune cookie. But that didn’t matter at all. I still think we got a bargain.

I never did make any major purchases around that time and definitely not a car. Also, the guinea pig didn’t predict that my future husband was coming into my life very, very soon- in fact he would be waiting for me at the airport when I returned from that trip. So he was predicting at a 0% accuracy rate.

No matter though- the guinea pig did a great job. I am positive that that guinea pig is just as fine an astrologer as any human who practices.

Well, I should get going. I’m making some pancakes for my guests because they haven’t had breakfast yet. After that I’ll get married. Being married to Jon should be an awful lot of fun, even if the guinea pig never saw it coming.